William Schaffner, MD discusses the technologies that can make it better

Every year, researchers are coming up with new technologies designed to create a vaccine that can better combat the fierce influenza illness.

In an exclusive Video Conference Reporter video from IDWeek 2018,William Schaffner, MD, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, characterizes the current vaccine's efficacy as "good, but not great," discusses what is being researched, and breaks down some data from the meeting.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

Influenza is almost with us, it's that time of the year, and it's one of the illnesses -- although it's common and expected -- it's one of the illnesses that infectious diseases doctors fear because it's so fierce. I mean, last year we had a terrible influenza year -- killed 80,000 people, and accounted for 900,000 hospitalizations. What we have is a good but not great influenza vaccine.

So at these meetings, the researchers who have their lights on in their laboratories at night are here telling us about new technologies that are designed to create better vaccines for the future. Vaccines that are going to be created, not in the ancient way of manufacturing them in eggs, but in other modalities, cell-based, plant-based vaccines. It's really kind of remarkable. That might get us better antigens, and then of course, there's always the discussion about the universal flu vaccine. Is there a vaccine that really could prevent infection with a whole variety of different types of strains of influenza? And perhaps a vaccine that we might only have to get every 5 or 10 years. That would change the whole way we could immunize the population in the United States.

I have a crystal ball here, and the crystal ball is always very cloudy about the future. So, if I were a betting man and had a lot of money, I'd put money on all the technologies because I would want all those investigators to proceed to try to make us a better vaccine. I'm not gonna put my quarter on one or the other. I just want all those research laboratories to keep working.

Now in the meantime, we do have some small advances, and as we know for people age 65 and older, we now have two licensed vaccines specifically for them. And there are data presented here again, that confirm the notion that, for example, the high-dose vaccine clearly works better in adults. We have information about the adjuvanted vaccine, similarly.

So those are advances, stepwise advances. Anything we can do to improve the quality of the vaccine, I think will lead to greater acceptance by the public and more enthusiasm on the part of the provider to actually get everybody vaccinated.

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